Traditional presentation media including photographs, slideshows, videos, animations, and so on have been used to develop multimedia presentations. For example, a presentation with video and animation may be developed by a teacher to help explain certain concepts to students. As another example, a slideshow may be developed to assist a person in presenting a complex topic at a conference. These traditional presentation media have been augmented with advanced tools for presenting complex computer-based presentation media such as Google Earth and Microsoft's Virtual Earth, Photosynth, HDView, and Xtensible Application Markup Language (“XAML”) renderers or presentation components.
Microsoft's Virtual Earth is a geospatial mapping tool that allows developers to create applications that layer location-relevant data on top of the Virtual Earth map images. The images are collected from satellites, aerial cameras, and other sources. Microsoft Photosynth is a tool that analyzes digital images of an object uploaded by a user to build a three-dimensional point cloud of the object. Pattern recognition components of Photosynth compare portions of images to create points, which are then compared to convert the image into a model. Users can interactively view Photosynth collections online by means of a 3D viewer. HD View is an image viewer tool that assists in the display of very large images. The digital images are stitched together to create images that can be in excess of a gigapixel in size. Such a gigapixel image may represent a panoramic view. HD View provides an interface for viewing such gigapixel images using panning and zooming. “XAML” can be used to define presentations that include visual and audio content that is rendered by a XAML renderer tool such as Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation.
Although these advanced tools can be used to generate complex presentations, these tools each provide very different user interfaces and application interfaces. A person who wants to prepare a presentation would select the tool that is most appropriate and develop the presentation using that tool. The person may create the media for the presentation from scratch and/or may extract portions of existing media and customize them for the presentation. Different portions of a presentation might be more effectively presented with a different tool or might already exist in different types of media or by using a combination of different types of media. Using current tools, however, it can be difficult to develop a presentation from these different types of media.